


All Things Seen

by little_brisk



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Tal Shiar, and interpersonal intimacy as the only way to confront same, or: every story about laris and zhaban is a story about redefining loyalty, so: the usual, traumas personal and political
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:22:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27284872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_brisk/pseuds/little_brisk
Summary: One night on Yuyat Beta: after a long career of compromised allegiance, Laris and Zhaban step together across the point of no return.A bit of a revision of the backstory offered by the Countdown comics, set before the evacuation, before the arrival of Picard and theVerity: I prefer to imagine Laris and Zhaban’s defection as a matter of conscience.
Relationships: Laris/Zhaban (Star Trek), or Laris & Zhaban, punctuation matters less than absolute devotion
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	All Things Seen

**Author's Note:**

> Heads up: fairly oblique but sustained reference to past sexual violence/coercion.

The night was clear and cool under the bright moons of Yuyat Beta, a temperate midwinter that smelled of late herbs and home fires. By the Yuyati calendar, it was the turn of a new year; by the Rihan one, it was eight hours shy of Laris’s hundredth birthday. And Zhaban did not yet know, not quite, how dramatically their lives were about to change.

He was laughing as he led her by the hand up the steep steps to the roof of their ramshackle farmhouse, and laughing as he brandished his humble token of a gift: four bottles of the small-batch, barrel-aged ale that she hadn’t tasted since they’d left the homeworld two years since.

‘To close out your first century,’ he said, and laughed again with the familiar thrill of the way she gasped and stared and smiled at him and thwacked him hard in the chest with the back of her hand.

‘Where did you get these?’ she breathed as reverently as though he had presented her with a packet of high-clearance data crystals.

‘Oh, you know,’ he replied coyly. ‘There was an opportunity today, between meetings at the governor’s house…’

‘You looted her cellar while no one was looking,’ Laris deadpanned, but with an admiring glance all the same.

‘That’s the one.’ He’d had few enough opportunities to exercise his specialism; a few bottles of Laris’s favorite were as good an excuse as any. ‘Well,’ he added, wanting full credit, ‘lots of people were looking.’

She laughed aloud. ‘You always were good with your hands,’ she said, eyes flashing, winding her fingers with his.

He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up: Laris, stone cold sober, giggling and making lewd remarks?

‘Yeah, okay,’ he said, extracting himself from her grip and giving her a wary look that was only half in jest. When she was like this, weapons fire or surprise sharp blades were rarely far behind. ‘Come sit.’ She settled next to him on the lip of the roof, kicking her legs out over the edge, practically vibrating with something far beyond the pleasure of a simple gift. ‘What’s gotten into you?’ he asked, tossing a bottle for her to catch.

‘Sedition,’ she said happily, popping the bottle open. Ah: weapons fire, sharp blades, or high crimes and acts of treason. He understood abruptly how large a role adrenaline was playing in her mood.

‘Well,’ he said, hoping she couldn’t hear the steep drop of his own heart, ‘we’ll get to that, then, but first: here’s to the next hundred.’

‘To the next hundred,’ she agreed, and linked her arm with his to drink, laughing as a fizzing blue stream poured down over her chin. In another hundred years—if they got so lucky—he’d never convince her she was too short to toast with him. He wiped her chin with his sleeve and she laughed again, caught his hand and kissed it.

‘You’re absurd,’ he said with bewildered affection. She grinned and raised her bottle, and took another long, deep swig. It still charmed him after all this time, how catlike little Laris drank like a longshoreman. He ruffled her hair; she elbowed him. He’d almost say it made it him feel like they were kids again, except that when they were kids he’d never seen her laugh.

All this time. How much more would they be granted?

The whole point of maneuvering their way to this backwater, years of planning for a precipitous demotion, had been to get away from the endless series of brutal compromises their lives together had always entailed. The idea of a slow bucolic existence periodically punctuated by the rote tasks associated with keeping tabs on a provincial governor of no particular talent or ambition had seemed beyond idyllic, even to inveterately urban Laris. How two agents of so many decades’ service had failed to see how obviously the prospect had been too good to be true, he still could not entirely fathom. Laris suspected some guiding hand, some planned deception, a punishment or test of loyalty, but Zhaban believed they’d been misled more simply by their own foolish hope.

There could, of course, be no escape. Not for the Tal Shiar's own, not within the Empire’s reach. They had lived and worked all their lives on the homeworld, always in the orbit of the beating heart of Rihan political life, and had not known how naive they were about conditions in the outer colonies. Almost the moment they’d arrived in their new settlement, they had seen that there would be no rest here, no retirement. Caught between the grasping governor on one side and the indigenous insurgency on the other, they'd found themselves both friendless and, in a way, more compromised than ever. It had not taken long at all to see that there could be no way forward, not in conscience, but to align with the Yuyati—but knowing that did not make it any easier to confront the reality of what it would require of them.

‘So,’ he ventured, almost resigned. ‘Sedition, huh?’ Subdued somewhat, Laris nodded, looking out into the quiet night, squinting at the distant glow of the governor’s estate like she was lining up a target.

‘I spoke to Kuyutkat today,’ she said. That brought it down to scale, a little. At the conceptual level the betrayal they had in mind remained unthinkable to him, but when he thought of Kuyu and her quiet pride, the steady, self-effacing way she led her people, he remembered what they were in this for. ‘She invited me to the sanctuary.’

He blinked. ‘As in…’

‘Yes.’ Laris had been working on earning that trust for over a year now.

‘Wow. And?’

‘I’m going to go. Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’ She drank deep and swallowed hard, and turned to meet his eye. ‘Will you come?’

He drew a hissing breath. It was one thing to turn a blind eye to the obvious comings and goings of their native neighbors to and from the shrine under the mountain, but another altogether to knowingly walk into the headquarters of their resistance. ‘If we do,’ he said, ‘that’s it. We’re committed.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you really prepared for that?’

‘I’ve been prepared for a long time,’ she said plainly. ‘My question is: are you?’

He wanted to give her an answer, but he couldn’t find an honest one. He couldn’t tell her what he’d be willing to sacrifice in order to go on living a life in which she laughed by moonlight, a safe little life in a safe little farmhouse, far from the eyes of the organization and the hypocrisies of the Empire. He had not yet found the courage to let go of that delusion, and he could not tell her that either.

‘Laris…’ he began, knowing he had nothing to follow it.

She held up a hand. ‘I’m going, with or without you, so. Make up your mind by morning.’

‘Right.’ He knew she wouldn’t go without him. He knew she knew she wouldn’t. And he knew she would not have put the question to him so bluntly if she were not already sure of him. He tried to remember a time when he had known before she did what he would do about anything of consequence, and came up empty. He laid his hand over hers, resting on the lip of the roof. ‘I will,’ he said. She nodded. She knew.

They sat in silence a long time, drinking and watching the moons rise and bathe the vines in their pale blue light.

Laris reached for a fresh bottle, popped its cap, and laughed suddenly, a low ironic chortle. She knocked the back of her hand against his knee. ‘Tir Maslonn,’ she said. His whole body tensed: what a grim non sequitur. But she leaned into him like it was a pleasant memory. ‘I’d been trying to place it. Tir Maslonn. That's what this reminds me of.’

‘Does it?’ he said, recalling as from a distant nightmare the cavernous rooms of the senator’s summer house where they had served their first assignment.

‘Mm. Up with you in secret in the dead of night, drinking ale you stole.’ She laughed. ‘Talking treason.’ He couldn’t imagine finding humor anywhere, not in their present circumstance and certainly not in that past one. It had been her nightmare, not his, but still she laughed.

His mother had set it up. He remembered her gesturing expansively with the snifter that in those days had been grafted onto her palm, boasting what a perfect first time out she’d found for them. Perfect because she could monitor them herself in situ, perfect because they wouldn’t even need a cover. As guests in the home of the senator, her cousin, she could present Zhaban and Laris as her protégés, beg the flattering favor of continuing their training in the political environment of such a household. In perfect openness lay the perfect trap: the senator, at home in ease and arrogance, would never see a threat that came in the form of a naïve, unfinished girl. What a triumph it would be for such a young agent to take down such a towering target! The memory was so vivid Zhaban felt it might snatch him right out of the ordinary flow of time: how his mother had taken Laris by the jaw and grinned like a drunken warrigul: _See, my dear, I told you this face would be the making of you!_ How she’d laughed. How Laris had held perfectly still, meeting her eye with an unblinking stare. How he’d stood right next to her and said nothing at all.

‘I think we must be remembering different things,’ he said now, with a too-familiar sick, tight feeling growing in his chest.

‘Yes,’ Laris said softly, laying a hand on his knee. ‘You’re remembering what an atrocity it was.’ She looked up at him with a sad half-smile. ‘What I remember is that you were the only person in that house who thought there was anything at all wrong with what was happening to me.’

In the blue moonlight that washed her features smooth he saw again the girl with the big dark eyes, too thin and all flint, who had sat up with him drinking pilfered ale nearly eighty years gone. The girl he’d lived so closely with for years and never really known til then. How all that summer she’d refused his every overture of sympathy with her ramrod posture and the hard set of her soft mouth. Out of that deep past returned to him, for a moment, the desperate helplessness he had felt before the outrageous lie she’d lived: that she was not suffering. Or that if she was, it was for the Empire. The fire in her eyes when she’d reminded him of that. How she’d believed it. How he had. How, believing, he had failed her.

And then the present restored her to him as she was now, on the eve of her centenary, so familiar, so inalienable, warm and open and smiling at him because she'd decided to burn her life to the ground on principle and she wanted him at her side when she did it. And he knew he’d die before he ever again chose the Empire and his own fear over Laris and the truth.

‘You're right,’ he said. ‘We have to go, tomorrow.’

‘Yes.’ She knocked back the last of her ale. ‘But I lied to you, just now.’

‘Did you?’ He smirked, in spite of everything.

‘I did.’ She held his gaze still. ‘Never in my life would I have gone without you.’

He laughed. ‘I know,’ he said.

She set her bottle down, took his and set it aside too. She held both his hands in both of hers and watched him closely: the girl with the big dark eyes. She kissed his fingertips. ‘All things seen between us,’ she said softly.

‘All things seen,’ he affirmed, returning the kiss. He closed his eyes, holding her hands lingeringly against his lips. They’d said the words so many times, so many hundreds if not thousands of times, that he’d almost forgotten that the first time had been one of those nights in his room at Tir Maslonn. After one bottle too many, he’d lost his grip and said aloud what he thought of what she was being made to do, what he thought of his mother and the senator and the Tal Shiar and the Empire, and instead of flying into one of her defensive passions, she had taken his hands in hers. It had been the first time she’d ever touched him not by accident or necessity. She had taken his hands without ceremony and just like that, she’d promised him the closest form of kinship: never to keep secrets. She still disdained his sympathy, but her posture eased, and she held on to his hands. Then she told him what she thought, too. And for eighty years thereafter, there was nothing that they had not shared.

‘Come on,’ she said now, standing and offering her hand, strong and steady. He took it, and stood, and drew her close. Her shoulders relaxed as he wrapped his arms around her.

‘All things seen, my heart,’ he repeated, murmuring against her hair. She sighed and leaned into him, rested her head against his chest. She smelled of ale and woodsmoke. She was still too thin. He held her for a long, long time.

Eventually, she pulled back with a wistful smile. ‘We should get some sleep,’ she said, reaching up to palm his cheek. ‘This time tomorrow, we’ll be traitors.’

‘No,’ he said. He tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘We won’t.’

Her smile grew. ‘No,’ she echoed, ‘We won’t.’ Like it was a sweet fantasy she’d indulge for his sake. Maybe it was. But looking at her, fierce and clear-eyed in the moonlight, he believed it.

He let her take his hand and lead him inside, and down the corridor, and, to his surprise, into her room, and then her bed. She slept instantly, as she always did; he lay awake and held her tight against him. Tomorrow, they would turn their backs on the Empire and everything they knew. He kissed her hair and listened to her breathe, and prayed they’d live to start another century together. But if nothing else, they would put an end, at last, to the compromises and betrayals.

Tomorrow, for the first time, they’d keep faith.


End file.
